Joaquin Phoenix Says He Talked To Christopher Nolan About Playing The Joker In ‘The Dark Knight’: “I Wasn’t Ready Then”

Joaquin Phoenix had his turn at playing the Joker in the Todd Phillips Joker films, but the actor could have played the DC Comics villain in The Dark Knight.

In a new interview, Phoenix revealed he had talked to director Christopher Nolan about giving life to Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime.

“I remember I talked to Chris Nolan about The Dark Knight and that didn’t happen for whatever reason,” Phoenix said on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin. “I wasn’t ready then. That’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘What is in me that’s not doing this?’ And it’s not about me. There’s something else. There’s another person who is going to do something.”

He continued, “I can’t imagine what it would be if we didn’t have Heath Ledger’s performance in that film, right?”

Phoenix said that he didn’t recall if Nolan “was coming to me saying, ‘You’re definitely the person,'” or the context of their conversation, but he sure knows they met, adding, “My feeling was I shouldn’t do this, but maybe he also was like, ‘He’s not the guy.’”

Ledger played the Joker in Nolan’s 2008 film, which posthumously won him an Oscar. Phoenix also won an Oscar for playing the Joker in the 2019 film.

THR recently reported that 2019’s Joker would have ended with Phoenix’s Joker carving a smile into his face, similar to Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. However, Nolan swayed the studio away from the villain, who had the same ending as his film. The report says that with Nolan not at Warner Bros. anymore, Phillips was able to end the sequel, having a character carving a smile into his face.